Mark Williams-Cook

And these three sites are always linked to when people talk about cars and they must be really good.

So if I'm looking for a document about cars, while there might be 10 million on my very small internet, the 10,000 that are in this little cluster, I'm going to look at first because everyone references them.

And that's very, very, I guess, not doing it justice, but that's the basis for how I think Google really became what it is today in terms of building on top of that.

Now, AI Search doesn't have that.

They have the text from everywhere, but working out which is the best text apart from the most common, which is the issue we came to earlier, because the consensus answer isn't necessarily the best answer when you need expert information, right?

Now, it's not widely spoken about, but the large language model companies are actually buying Luke graph data from the companies, the SAS companies that spend a lot of time money making their own independent kind of

crawls of the web and they have their own kind of scores um which are similar to google's in some ways and they are selling that data which i assume is being used during pre-training to turn the volume up kind of on those sites because they we know they are for want of a better word good known good yeah so um and this this has worked really really quite well for a long time um

Not withstanding, as I said before, Google uses a lot of interaction, kind of click data to refine what it shows.

But as a core, we can trust these documents.

That's still the most impactful thing you can do, I think, in terms of SEO once you've done all the other basics is, you know, earn this coverage and links from people.

Now, why I said it's going to rot and what kind of worries me is a lot of the AI search tools will do grounding, i.e.

they will do a search, they will do a web search.

And this is happening...

almost exclusively through Google and Bing.

They're saying, okay, you've asked me this question.

I know I need to check the answer.

I'm going to quickly go and do three searches on Google, look at the first 10, 20, 30 documents, check what my model output and make sure everything is kind of hunky-dory and then give some very scant citations to who I just nixed all the content from.

Now, those results are powered by that link graph.

That link graph survives because people are out there journeying the open web, clicking on links, looking at websites.

But if we change to a paradigm where, well, I don't need to go to Reddit anymore to get this advice.